Conserving Resilience
By Ben Alder | From Kingston
June 2026
Recently, I have been thinking a great deal about time.
As I approach my fifty-first birthday and watch my children grow up, the precious nature of time is easily internalized.
Time can never be saved, only spent.
One of the reasons I have always been fascinated by geology is that its lessons are rooted in long periods of time. Geologic processes teach patience. In truth, patience has never been one of my strong suits. Perhaps that is why deep time, the formation of soil, and the evolution of the landscape have long dominated both my interests and my professional life. “We seek what eludes us.”
As a young boy, I was always in the dirt, building swamps in my sandbox. Looking back, I was essentially building small wetland restoration projects with levees, berms, pits, mounds, and the backyard hose. Today, I imagine those forty-five-year-old relics have crystallized into a sedimentary conglomerate of Transformers, G.I. Joe figures, and small plastic armies.
Like the formations in my sandbox, the Chesapeake Bay did not simply appear. It is the product of processes that began thousands of years ago when the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated and rising seas flooded the Susquehanna River valley.
The glacier is long gone, yet every tide still moves through a landscape it created.
This is a grounding fact.
It reminds me that the most important forces in our lives are often the ones we cannot see because they work so slowly. We inherit them. We live within them. We add our own layers to them. Then we pass them to the next generation.
For better or worse, those layers of experience become a conglomerate of lessons and, hopefully, greater resilience for those who come next.
It seems to me resilience is not simply the ability to endure hardship. It is not survival alone. Its greatest value is revealed through adaptation.
Resilience is not a static state. As in life, we are never finished learning.
In business, the work is never complete. Even the most successful company must continue improving and better serving its mission.
The same is true of marriage and relationships. They evolve, learn, and adapt through shared experience.
Resilience is not withstanding change and remaining the same.
Resilience is adapting, improving, learning, and remaining committed to the mission.
The Chesapeake itself illustrates this. It was formed slowly as the Laurentide Ice Sheet receded, and even today it continues to be shaped by countless physical and ecological processes. Its resilience is defined by its ability to evolve and adapt to changing conditions. It has done so for thousands of years, despite the dramatic changes we have imposed upon its shores, forests, and fields during the last century.
Given this understanding of resilience, it raises an important question.
Why do we continue to approach the landscape as though permanence should always be our objective?
A rigid pursuit of permanence often yields fewer protections because permanence itself quickly becomes subjective. In trying to preserve a single moment, we can unintentionally limit the landscape’s ability to adapt to the future.
Sometimes we write many words to express a simple idea.
Ecological resilience deserves thoughtful discussion because it underpins how we shape conservation policy.
My ecology professor, Dr. Henry Merchant, often referred to some research as “simple statements of the obvious.”
He also kept a quote on his wall:
“Not only are ecosystems more complicated than we think, they are more complicated than we can think.”
Time.
Resilience.
Conservation.
Each stands on its own. Together, they challenge how we think about land stewardship.
The challenge today is the tyranny of the immediate. Everything is on demand. Planning horizons continue to shrink.
If we are serious about conserving landscapes like the Chesapeake, we must better understand ecological resilience and measure success over longer periods of time.
Locking the landscape into rigid models of permanence without allowing for adaptation ignores both future human needs and future ecological needs, many of which we cannot yet anticipate.
We must remain resilient and extend the same courtesy to the land, for it has no measure of time.
